Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

  this legend begin with the parrot taking leave of its mother and end with its being assisted by all kinds of birds in burying her once it returns, the main part of the story shows the parrot dialoguing with humans, in the earliest-known versions with its captors and their old mother, a prefect and a girl-

  servant, and the emperor.28

  The lack of hospitality toward talking animals in Chinese literature is

  definitely not caused by a lack of fantasy. The authors of the ancient texts that were eventually gathered in the Zhuangzi loved to illustrate their essays with a great variety of fables and parables, a few of them also including talking animals.29 But in later centuries the Zhuangzi was often considered an absurd and fantastic work, and its style was only very rarely, and then only very

  tamely, imitated in imperial China. Other early philosophers, too, may illustrate their arguments with anecdotes, including animal fables, but these

  animals only very rarely talk, and in one of the best-known examples (the

  tale of the fox that talks the tiger into believing it is the king of animals and not the tiger), the likelihood that the tale is of Indian origin is very large. In the absence of native Chinese traditions of fable collections, modern Chinese scholars have scoured ancient writings for anecdotes that may be qualified

  as fables, but if one reads these modern collections of ancient tales, one

  encounters relatively few animal tales, and among these animal tales only a very few feature talking animals, and the number of these tales dwindles as the first millennium progresses and the force of traditional poetics is more and more felt among the cultural elite. Throughout the first and second millennia, the historical exemplum remained far more popular than the animal

  fable. Animal fables of the Tang dynasty (618–906) may evince a keen obser-

  vation of actual animal behavior, but upon close reading include only one or two examples of talking beasts.30

  One narrow niche in premodern times that accepted the animal fable even

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  explains the spread of the tale of the Wolf of Zhongshan, which is first known from sixteenth-century versions. The fable tells the story of a traveling scholar (a Mohist, who believes in universal love) and the wolf he saves from hunters by hiding it in his book case. After the hunters have passed on and the scholar has freed the wolf, it wants to eat the scholar, because otherwise it will die of hunger. The scholar calls the animal ungrateful; it counters with the argument that ingratitude is the way of the world. When the scholar still refuses to be eaten by the wolf, the two of them decide to submit their case to the judgment of three elders. An old plum tree and an old water buffalo both side with the wolf: after having served their owners all their lives, the first is now about to be chopped down for firewood and the second is about to be slaughtered and

  eaten. The third elder they meet, the local god of the soil, first wants to see for himself whether the big wolf fits into the small book case. Once the wolf has jumped into the case, eager to have its meal, he orders the scholar to kill the ungrateful animal. This story, which would go on to be performed onstage and told in ballads and is still quite popular today, was widely read by traditional Chinese literati as an attack on the official Li Mengyang (1473–1530), who was said to have betrayed his original patron to advance his career. This reading of the tale has remained en vogue even though it has often been pointed out that this interpretation is not supported by facts.31

  Pleading Animals in Verse

  For a more hospitable home for talking animals in China we have to turn to

  entertainment literature and popular ballads, genres beyond the legislating power of traditional poetics. But it should be stressed that even in such performative genres, texts featuring speaking animals are rare, and most of them are short.

  During the first millennium the genre for the extended treatment of ani-

  mals in verse was the fu, or rhapsody. From the third century BCE, rhapsodies were declamation pieces, written mostly in rhyming lines of four or six syllables. The length of a rhapsody was determined by its subject, which could range from cosmic journeys and imperial hunting parks to objects as small and evanescent as water bubbles. Most of the preserved early examples of the genre are deictic in character, and their authors evidently made a point of exhibiting the full extent of the vocabulary at their disposal. Animals, especially birds, were a popular subject with early writers of rhapsodies, but they did not allow their beasts to speak. In Jia Yi’s (200–168 BCE) Rhapsody on the Owl (Funiao fu), we learn the thoughts of the bird only in the voice of the poet: This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:26 UTC

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  The owl heaved a heavy sigh,

  Raised its head, flapping its wings,

  But since its beak cannot speak

  Allow me to state what it thought.

  Even the parrot in Mi Heng’s (173–198) Rhapsody on the Parrot (Yingwu fu)

  is not allowed to utter a single word.32 Whatever moral meaning the animals in these two works and many others may have, they are not permitted to

  express their emotions and thoughts in their own voice.

  But as the rhapsodies were declamation pieces, their language could also

  be rather vernacular, and some of these pieces structured their contents by a clear narrative. While the genre has traditionally been associated with elite culture and even court culture, Chinese scholars nowadays set aside a few

  works as “popular rhapsodies” ( sufu). The works discussed as such occasionally deal with extended animal tales. The best-known examples have a very

  vernacular coloring and have only been discovered in recent times. The earliest text is the Rhapsody of the Divine Crow (Shenwu fu), which was found in 1993 in a tomb of the final years of the Western Han dynasty. It tells the story of a couple of loving birds that settle in the high trees of a seemingly friendly prefecture. When both birds are away collecting building materials, a thief steals their twigs. When the wife runs into the thief, they get into an altercation that develops into a fight. Severely wounded, she makes it back to her husband. He vows to die together with her, but she quotes classical authorities against such a course of action. While the thief gets off scot-free, the male crow eventually leaves upon the death of its wife.33 Another often mentioned example of the popular rhapsody is the Rhapsody of the Falcon and the Sparrow (Yaoque fu) by the famous poet Cao Zhi (192–232), whose text has baffled

  generations of commentators by its highly colloquial language. In this story, a sparrow captured by a falcon frees itself by its glib talk.34

  While the two works discussed above may well be related metaphorically

  to some aspects of their authors’ careers, such speculations do not apply to the most famous example of the genre, the anonymous Rhapsody of the

  Swallow (Yanzi fu), which was found in a number of copies among the thousands of manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang when a cave that had been

  walled up shortly after the year 1000 was opened again circa 1900. In this

  work, which probably dates from the ninth or early tenth century, a swallow returns in spring to its old nest to find it occupied by a sparrow, which refuses to move out. Following a lengthy altercation, the swallow appeals to the court of the phoenix, the king of birds. The sparrow is duly summoned to court and This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:26 UTC

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  following a first interrogation is imprisoned. In jail, it is visited by its wife.

  At a second interrogation the sparrow claims a preferential treatment from

  the court because of its prior service to the state. The phoenix eventually reassigns the nest to the swallow, but does not further punish the sparrow, and orders both birds to live in harmony in the future.35 Among the manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang is yet another work titled Rhapsody of the Swallow, which has been preserved in only a single copy. Written in rhyming stanzas of eight lines of five syllables each, it tells basically the same story, but whereas the first version focuses on the judicial procedure, this text parodies legal language in the long altercation of the two birds before they go to court.36 From Dunhuang we also have a long poem titled The Names of the Hundred Birds (Bainiao ming), which is basically a catalog of birds, mention-ing for each its status and function at the court of the phoenix.37 Why birds play such a prominent role in these early verse tales and no other animals is an interesting question.38 Is it because birds are bipeds like human beings?

  Is it because of the role birds may have played in early Chinese mythology?

  Or is it because birds were once upon a time used to indicate the rank of

  officials in court, stipulating a homology between the hierarchy of human

  society and the kingdom of birds? Or because of their intelligence? Or

  because of their song? How long the court case of the swallow and the spar-

  row continued to circulate in popular and oral literature after the year 1000

  is impossible to ascertain, but there is no reason to assume that it immediately dropped from circulation after that year.39

  The manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang are important because they

  provide us with several examples of the type of texts that will become the

  mainstay of many genres of popular literature in the second millennium.

  These are the prosimetrical narrative texts that tell their story in a continuous alternation of prose and verse, the verse passages as a rule being written in rhyming lines of seven syllables each. In the second millennium, many genres of popular literature adopted this format; as time proceeded, some of these genres also started to incorporate verse sections written in lines of ten syllables. When we reach more recent centuries, some genres rely exclusively

  on lines of ten syllables for their passages in verse. Among the Dunhuang

  manuscripts we also find narrative ballads that are exclusively written in

  verse, and some genres of popular literature of late-imperial times continued this format, again, in some cases eventually substituting ten-syllable lines for seven-syllable lines.

  The manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang also inform us about changes

  in the Chinese conception of the underworld in the ninth and tenth centuries.

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  From very early on in the first millennium, the Chinese conceived of the

  underworld as a realm where everyone tried to settle his or her scores against the dead and the living by engaging in lawsuits. By the end of the first millennium, this legal labyrinth was reorganized by the popularization of the

  cult of the Ten Kings, headed by King Yama. Yama had originated in South

  Asia as a god of the dead and the underworld and had been introduced into

  China by Buddhism, at the same time when introducing the Indian concep-

  tion of multiple hells and their cruel punishments.40 According to the texts dedicated to this cult of the Ten Kings, the souls of the dead upon arrival in the underworld pass through the courts of the Ten Kings to be judged for

  their deeds while alive: on the seventh day following death the soul appears before the first judge, on the fourteenth day following death before the second judge, and so on, until on the forty-ninth day after death the soul appears before the seventh judge. The soul appears before the eighth judge on the one hundredth day following death, before the ninth judge one year after death, and before the tenth and final judge twenty-seven months after death.

  Depending upon their virtues and sins, all carefully recorded in the ledgers kept in the underworld, these souls are either condemned to long periods of suffering in one of the eighteen hells (and in the worst case in the even lower Avici hell) or allowed to be reborn on one of the sixth paths of rebirth, the highest one of which is rebirth as a human being (preferably as a man),

  because only as a human being (if born at the right time) could one hear the teaching of the Buddha and achieve nirvana.41 The courts of the Ten Kings,

  however, served not only the souls of humans but also those of animals, and some pictures from Dunhuang show animals approaching the bench holding

  written statements in their mouth in which they presumably detail their cruel treatment at the hands of harsh owners, eager hunters, inventive cooks, and insatiable gourmands.42 But if the animals in these illustrations hold formal statements in their mouth, it does not mean they lack the power of speech.

  In the classical tales of the Tang period and the Five Dynasties (907–960),

  “animals . . . have souls of their own, and in the courts of the underworld they appear as articulate and determined plaintiffs at the trials of men who have treated them cruelly or wantonly taken their lives.”43 But it was fixed procedure in traditional Chinese courts that the accusation should be submitted

  not only orally but also in writing, a very sensible practice in a judicial system in which one has to assume that the magistrate is from outside the local community and has great difficulty in understanding the local dialect.44

  In the second millennium, the protagonists in Chinese animal tales no

  longer seek justice in the world of the living (as the swallow still did), but put This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:26 UTC

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  their faith in the verdict of King Yama. The one to do so most conspicuously is the ox. The exploitation of this patient animal by humankind had already been decried at length by the famous Tang-dynasty author Liu Zongyuan

  (773–819) in his Rhapsody on the Ox (Niu fu), but he had not allowed the animal to speak out.45 From the thirteenth century, however, we have The Plaint of the Ox (Niu su yuan), a long set of songs by Yao Shouzhong written in the voice of a slaughtered ox. The set starts out idyllically enough:

  My nature’s rude, my mind simple;

  Living in a misty village I was conversant with farm work.

  Ugly as I was, I still was a subject of painting and picture:

  Near Apricot Blossom Village,

  And on the Peach Grove fields,

  After the spring breeze had passed by,

  I would beyond the sparse grove as the red sun was sinking

  Carry on my back a herd boy blowing his flute going home.

  The ox first eloquently recounts all the services it had rendered during its lifetime to its owner by plowing the fields, then narrates how it was slaughtered once it grew old and too weak to do its job, proceeds by exhaustively cataloging the many ways in which each of its body parts has been used upon its death, and ends by appealing to King Yama:

  My allotted lifetime was not yet finished,

  Yet I died in a truly cruel and bitter way,

  So I appeal to Your Majesty King Yama as you are right and impartial:

  I cannot recount all sufferings during my lifetime.46
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  But the most popular underworld court case involving animals in late-

  imperial China is not a case of an animal that with good reason accuses its former owner or another human being, but one of an animal that accuses

  another animal, the case of the mouse accusing the cat. According to one

  early adaptation of the underworld court case of the mouse against the cat, the crowd in front of King Yama’s office when he holds court on the first of the month includes many kinds of animals, including fishes and birds, insects and snakes. One party of litigants is made up of a bedbug, a flea, and a louse—

  their case is thrown out of court by an overworked King Yama.47 The case of the mouse against the cat, however, was by far the most widely known case

  of an animal accusing another animal of murder, and versions can be found

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  in all parts of China.48 It was so popular in the nineteenth century that two versions were translated into English.49 Some versions are preserved in manuscript or print from that period or the Republican period, many other versions were recorded in the 1980s and later in the context of the campaigns to inventory China’s folk arts, and still other versions remain part of the repertoire of contemporary entertainers. Many adaptations of the tale deal only with

  the court case itself, which they may try to develop in various ways, while as many other versions contain a prequel of some type or another. In some cases the prequel provides an account of the war between the mice and the cats,

  which has a long history outside China, but in China itself is not encountered before the nineteenth century.50 More often the prequel narrates the story of how the wedding party of the mice was raided by the cats. In the most complicated version of the court case as A Tale without Shape or Shadow (Wuying zhuan), the account of the court case is preceded by accounts of both the raid of the cats on the bride-fetching party of the mice and the full-fledged war between the mice and the cats. Whatever the nature of the prequel, the outcome is always the same: the slain rodent appears in the underworld and